‘My name is OPNAV, king of the 21st Century Navy: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Clark, Mullen, Roughead, Greenert, Richardson, Gilday, and Franchetti.
Where are they on this tablet of woe? Where did they expend their personal and professional capital during their tenure to ensure this well expected trainwreck would not take place?
This is not new. This is not shocking. This is the expected part of The Terrible 20s we have been discussing for 14-years.
LCS.
There was not systemic reform.
DDG-1000.
Congress failed to make a substantive change.
CG(X).
We shrugged, accepted gross failure, and defaulted to building Burkes until the crack of doom.
You know the rest of the story, or lack of story. The lack of a story of accountability. Institutional self-reflection resulting in change towards improvement. A story of building a service transparent, reliable, and setting the standard of meeting the challenge already at our door.
When just papered over the festering rot of systems that are same structures, policies, culture, and in many cases people who brought us here. Why would one expect any difference in outcome?
We lied to each other. We lied to Congress. We lied to the world. From Arkansas to AUKUS, this moment will have impact.
Eventually the music will stop. We are now on the second generation of leaders who have been happy to ignore this systemic failure of performance as if it is a force of nature to endure, and not a creation of man that can be changed.
If you are waiting for the uniformed leadership to speak clearly on this, you simply have not been paying attention.
If you think the Executive Branch leadership will address this, you have not been awake the last 26-months.
The only solution to this wholesale institutional failure will be in Congress. It will need the will, power, and wisdom to do what Alexander did in Gordium, and be content to do it making no friends, and receiving no personal benefit or fame.
From the lazy to the greedy, too many are vested in the inertia of the present system, and the ease of position and profit that comes with it.
It is a fetid, thorny bush we have planted and nurtured, now we must harvest its bitter fruits.
Over the past decade, GAO found that the U.S. Navy has faced significant challenges in meeting its shipbuilding goals, experiencing years of construction delays, billions of dollars in cost growth, and frequent quality and performance shortfalls. The Supervisors of Shipbuilding, Conversion and Repair (SUPSHIP) serve as the Navy's on-site technical, contractual, and business authority for the construction of Navy vessels at major private shipyards. The SUPSHIPs are responsible for evaluating the construction and business practices of Navy shipbuilders, but face challenges in improving shipbuilding results (see figure).
Factors Limiting the Ability of the Navy's Supervisors of Shipbuilding, Conversion and Repair (SUPSHIP) to Help Improve Shipbuilding Program Results
These challenges impede the SUPSHIPs' effectiveness and accountability in a number of ways:
Variation in quality requirements across Navy shipbuilding contracts hinders the SUPSHIPs' ability to provide consistent oversight of shipbuilding quality.
Limited input from the SUPSHIPs prior to contract awards does not leverage their expertise to support well-informed decision-making.
Omission of SUPSHIP reporting from the Navy's process for approving acceptance of ships from the shipbuilders reduces accountability and misses opportunities to ensure that independent SUPSHIP input on ship quality and readiness informs this key decision.
The SUPSHIPs' position within the Naval Sea Systems Command and their accountability to different technical and acquisition organizations dilutes their ability to be a distinct, authoritative voice in decision-making for Navy shipbuilding programs. Congress passed legislation in December 2021 to establish a Deputy Commander dedicated to the SUPSHIPs, which should help improve their authority and accountability.
Why GAO Did This Study
Despite the efforts of the SUPSHIPs and others to assure construction quality and contract execution, Navy shipbuilding results have regularly fallen short of program expectations. These results have raised questions about the Navy's ability to effectively oversee shipbuilder performance throughout the construction of new ships.
Congress included a provision in a Senate report for GAO to review the SUPSHIPs' oversight efforts. GAO examined, among other objectives, the SUPSHIPs' role in assuring shipbuilding quality and any challenges that limit their ability to help improve shipbuilding program results.
To do this work, GAO reviewed federal regulations as well as policy, guidance, and reporting related to the SUPSHIPs' oversight activities and results. GAO also interviewed DOD and Navy officials about shipbuilding oversight and the SUPSHIPs' role in the execution of shipbuilding programs.
It begs the question, “What if any action was taken in the time period of .54 of a WorldWar?
I can understand ignoring two decades of pounding away on a keyboard by a middling retired USN CDR and his band of merry friends … but the GAO too?
What navalists, the American taxpayer, and more importantly their elected representatives tasked in our Constitution with oversight authority should ask is, “Why?”
The most important question in the English language; “Why?”
Gird your loins, as knowledge of the answer will drive even the best to rage and despair.
Our industrial base was shipped overseas, especially our drydocks and other equipment. The Clinton administration closed all of our government-owned shipyards and now we don't have the infrastructure to gear up and put more hulls in the water. They sold everything that wasn't bolted down, catering to NIMBYs who hate icky industrial plants and shipyards.
Key trades atrophied as there was no work and no prospects and our ruling class prioritized getting a ruinously wasteful college degree funded by student loans at the expense of the trades.
I'm nominally right-wing or whatever you want to call it, but trying to compete against state-funded shipyards in other countries with purely commercial works beholden to stockholders isn't working. We need a massive investment in our shipyards and industrial base.
That's not to mention what we are trying to build is total crap. The Littoral "Combat" Ship is the biggest embarrassment in procurement, up there with the Sergeant York DIVADS disaster when the stupid radar on that AAA vehicle locked up on the fan in a crapper during testing. That high-speed empty hull couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag, if it isn't dockside getting repaired by tech-reps since the crew complement is smaller than the IQ of most of Congress.
We get a nice foreign frigate design that works well, the FREMM, and what do we do with it? We completely redesign it, going from 85% commonality to 15%. Why bother using the original design anyhow and just go clean sheet in that instance? I get that we need to have our weapons, sensors and combat systems, but do we need to completely redesign the wheel there when the Chinese are outbuilding us 10-1?
We're a deeply divided country among partisan and ethnic lines that can't agree on anything. Our ruling class encourages perversion and anti-white bigotry at every turn while spending our great-grandchildren into the poorhouse to provide Israel and Ukraine with billions in borrowed money to fight wars we don't need to be involved in.
China's population might be getting older, but they can at least put hulls in the water and crews on those ships. We're too busy training our sailors in diversity garbage and what pronouns to use to worry about preparing them for battle or heck, navigating ships without collisions.
If we had to fight a major war, we'd lose. We'd lose BADLY. I don't want to say that, but it's the truth. I'm one of those veterans who actively encourage young people NOT to join the service. If diversity and sexual deviants is what our ruling class want in the military, let them fight and die in these pointless wars to enrich the plutocrats.
Sal…”a middling retired USN CDR and his band of merry friends” continue to ring the alarm bell but Congress and the people appear to be tone deaf. Sir, you undersell yourself as the herald of Naval hypocrisy, doublespeak and doom amongst our leadership. The more this old Marine reads, the more I’m falling into your ranks when muster is sounded. When I see what the Navy is doing with readiness and shipbuilding and our beloved Corps is doing with FD2030 and our so-called amphibious Navy…you cannot avoid asking the tough questions.
To tie a bow on your comments today, there’s this from today’s Early Bird: “US Navy ship programs face years-long delays amid labor, supply woes.” Like that’s news…
Meanwhile, let’s keep painting drone kills on the sides of aircraft in the Red Sea and thinking we are warfighters. Years of apathy and complacency on full display. Our adversaries should be licking their chops.
Carry on, Sir! I’ll continue yelling at the kids to get off the grass.
Our industrial base was shipped overseas, especially our drydocks and other equipment. The Clinton administration closed all of our government-owned shipyards and now we don't have the infrastructure to gear up and put more hulls in the water. They sold everything that wasn't bolted down, catering to NIMBYs who hate icky industrial plants and shipyards.
Key trades atrophied as there was no work and no prospects and our ruling class prioritized getting a ruinously wasteful college degree funded by student loans at the expense of the trades.
I'm nominally right-wing or whatever you want to call it, but trying to compete against state-funded shipyards in other countries with purely commercial works beholden to stockholders isn't working. We need a massive investment in our shipyards and industrial base.
That's not to mention what we are trying to build is total crap. The Littoral "Combat" Ship is the biggest embarrassment in procurement, up there with the Sergeant York DIVADS disaster when the stupid radar on that AAA vehicle locked up on the fan in a crapper during testing. That high-speed empty hull couldn't fight its way out of a wet paper bag, if it isn't dockside getting repaired by tech-reps since the crew complement is smaller than the IQ of most of Congress.
We get a nice foreign frigate design that works well, the FREMM, and what do we do with it? We completely redesign it, going from 85% commonality to 15%. Why bother using the original design anyhow and just go clean sheet in that instance? I get that we need to have our weapons, sensors and combat systems, but do we need to completely redesign the wheel there when the Chinese are outbuilding us 10-1?
We're a deeply divided country among partisan and ethnic lines that can't agree on anything. Our ruling class encourages perversion and anti-white bigotry at every turn while spending our great-grandchildren into the poorhouse to provide Israel and Ukraine with billions in borrowed money to fight wars we don't need to be involved in.
China's population might be getting older, but they can at least put hulls in the water and crews on those ships. We're too busy training our sailors in diversity garbage and what pronouns to use to worry about preparing them for battle or heck, navigating ships without collisions.
If we had to fight a major war, we'd lose. We'd lose BADLY. I don't want to say that, but it's the truth. I'm one of those veterans who actively encourage young people NOT to join the service. If diversity and sexual deviants is what our ruling class want in the military, let them fight and die in these pointless wars to enrich the plutocrats.
Sal…”a middling retired USN CDR and his band of merry friends” continue to ring the alarm bell but Congress and the people appear to be tone deaf. Sir, you undersell yourself as the herald of Naval hypocrisy, doublespeak and doom amongst our leadership. The more this old Marine reads, the more I’m falling into your ranks when muster is sounded. When I see what the Navy is doing with readiness and shipbuilding and our beloved Corps is doing with FD2030 and our so-called amphibious Navy…you cannot avoid asking the tough questions.
To tie a bow on your comments today, there’s this from today’s Early Bird: “US Navy ship programs face years-long delays amid labor, supply woes.” Like that’s news…
Meanwhile, let’s keep painting drone kills on the sides of aircraft in the Red Sea and thinking we are warfighters. Years of apathy and complacency on full display. Our adversaries should be licking their chops.
Carry on, Sir! I’ll continue yelling at the kids to get off the grass.